Factoryville Eclogue

"Parabolic birds. The color of stories."

The first poem in my new book, FAR AWAY (winner of the 2014 Red Mountain Poetry Award), available now from Red Mountain Press.

Far Away

Here's the link to book purchases with Red Mountain Press, including my book, Far Away, which will be out on October 1st and which appears at the top of the list here. The book description is below.

The poems in Far Away explore the gothic landscapes and depleted economies of a semi-fictional state on the margins of empire. The beleaguered voice at the center of this collection wanders through foreclosed houses and shattered relationships, caught between vision and memory, forgetting and curiosity . . . . Human loss and state neglect overlap in Far Away to reveal a republic of isolation.

Two New Poems from Ryan Collins

Dear Madison—

                                    Cakes & stacks counted, our tinsel steerage

            stretched to the seam-splitting.  The undoing of mass &

            matter reveals a particle god at the stone-sharpened edge

            of light speed.  Do-on’t stop/believing, o undetoxed brother! 

            Our leathers toughen despite retreating glaciers, despite

            lower case wind chills.  So what everything isn’t frozen—

            do we ever fully thaw?  It’s hard to lament bike racks &

scraped elm braches & parking meters not appearing as
giant novelty ice cubes twelve weeks out of the year.  Of

course there are accounts to be paid.  The storms of this

            century have fuckall to do with weather.  More the climate. 

            We shake & chandelier w/out putting boots on the ceiling,

            closer to boots on the moon, boot to the Kool, the steel-

toed kick in the face blasting you awake, your short term

memory clouded & hacked.  We are corrupted files.  We

corrupt the clouds as we accelerate through an infinity of

            blind left turns & prayer w/ each breath to be obliterated

& fully incorporated into the light of our thin-aired maker.   

  

from The Challenger Deep

Giant waves rise   plates fold

The sea floor roars back in

To deep sea   microphones

Capture    the sound being

Destroyed   pulsing through

Bodies   collapsing every gap

Every space air hides   into

Shatter   bolt-like graves litter

The ocean’s floor   fifty tons

Of gasoline   absorbed no fire

No heat to float to the surface

Waves seven miles down rise

Consume the surface warmth

The deep’s pressure summoned    

Ryan Collins is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Dear Twin Falls (H_NGM_N, forthcoming 2013).  His poems can be, or will be, found in American Letters & Commentary; DIAGRAM; Forklift, Ohio; Handsome; H_NGM_N; Ilk; iO: A Journal of New American Poetry; Scud; Smoking Glue Gun; Spork; Transom; the Hell Yes Press cassette anthology 21 Love Poems; and many other places.  He is the executive director of the Midwest Writing Center and an English instructor at St. Ambrose University.  He plays drums in The Multiple Cat and lives in Rock Island, IL.

Three Poems by Dan Rosenberg

NO EXAMPLE BUT THE NAMING

Here deep light. Here deep light rising
from a sack of rusted whistles.

Rustles in the closet’s deep light.
A breath is a breach, cuts a lip
on deep light. Here bedpost tops
wicked in a rattle. Brassy
like an undergarment. Undone.
Such keeping tracks the eye.

New holes make a shirt perfect
for this deformity. The box cries from its corners,
the mold-bearded box.
Here air ages. Manners tip gently
in the lone. Deep something
thumps down and startles.

In the sleeping hour, the hour of disobedience.
The scavenge comes
unbidden. The tic, the squeak.

Here deep light beats back.
It comes in slats. It comes:
The hamper of efforts drooling knee socks.
A blue vase collects itself.
Here blank walls for walls

are not lit by deep light.
Not the bur on time tugged forth.
See a fray failing a shoelace.
Here deep light kept rolled like wrong carpet.

Deep light without aim. Dying
pockets of air. Each pocket
sent mewing at deep light.

ROOM

the floor is a storeroom

we keep each other
in the original packaging

I bought you a t-shirt with many kinds of breasts
I was desperate

something to say I care but not too much

The sun taxes me heartily
                                          and my heart

lost in our angular house
for a place to leave       things and never remember

I want to go to the movies I said
            I was joking       the hand on your knee
when we were alone was mine

I slit the folded paper: a book! of dust-
collecting     the air mattress’s sotto voce

Am I using this bookshelf wrong?

that child safety cap fails
because you’re a grown woman stumped

to listen hard I ignore my own pulse
we all do
the delicate touch       the stamen     a stone
bookend shaped like a book

laundered the sun in a pile of feeling
up oneself absentmindedly on the phone

slouching over my weak core like protection
not a symptom

when I forget to say “I” you remind

the chickadee all puffed up      the driveway

how much of our favorite non-stick pan
can we safely eat?

the tongue of the prayer book        on the hardwood
a stack of change won’t do me      ok then

the plastic frame worked all its scuffs
would have happened to the picture if

a stretch of the esophagus
            what’s bloodied by the camera
            what’s lost without a backup
            plan for fire: a tangled rope of knots

and the anchor      the doorknob’s inside doesn’t match

                      but fits


AT FLOWER, GRIPPING

Epistle, a yellow footprint on the hardwood. Open the fist, a
palm. A shake. Nine walnuts in a Ziploc baggie chatter. I'm
holding. I'm shaking. My photograph slinks down. Its frame.
Frayed like shoelace. Her lips purse. Every edge threatens a
fall. Even hems, even lips, even beauty's tight edge. I'm
pressing against. The factory atop my neck. The spill. One
flash surprises, the next captures. I freeze wide open. It's a
countdown. If thunder comes. Chewing comes easily. Yellow
my finger in the lily. It doesn't keep to itself. As well as it
should. Woman in bra between dogwoods. Red spills on her
head. Just a magazine ad. A dangle. A docile puppy in a nook.
A shoulder. I've fallen. Not my nook. Limpid with springtime
my angles. Shake, a greater tremble. Tremble my ginger veins.
A color wheel of fingers. Pointing, a basement before dawn.
The chimney a finger. What she wants. My eyes, then the
frame. Then my chest. A descent. A cracked cocoon. No
moth. Bulbs in the basement open. It takes forever. Petals
fall, her feet. Recover the ants all together. Light, then hand,
then wall. Thumb becomes a mandible. Touch my crushing
organ. My outreach. A small apple falls. The worm inside.
What eats. What's eaten. Two flowers kiss, wilt. The cyclist
falls. The garbage is a nest.

Dan Rosenberg's first book, The Crushing Organ, won the 2011 American Poetry Journal Book Prize and will be published in 2012. His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in several journals, including Pleiades, American Letters & Commentary, Subtropics, and Gulf Coast. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is a PhD student at UGA and co-editor of the poetry journal Transom.

Two Poems by Dustin Luke Nelson

We’ll know we’ve hit the big time when we’ve got a set of equipment for smut and then another for non-smut

I’ve been doing sit-ups.
Sit-ups every day under
pulled curtains & now I’m
a disassembled pen waiting
for spit balls to papier-mâché
fluorescent lights.
Brigades of knob-eyed
ferrets tuck our coins,
our coin-shaped wedding rings,
& our gold-plated Velcro straps
into hollow slats beneath
our beds. When I have bed
head I just cut out the offending
hairs, kneeling over the toilet,
flushing away the evidence.
I’ve been doing sit-ups.
I’ve been trimming the skin
inside my nose with formaldehyde
& rosewater. Others are using embalming
fluid. It’s fashionable. We’re rising.
We’re gaseous. We’re blinding sun
particulars. We’re furious for glory.
Forward! Fold your underwear
lengthwise. Trample the one-
eyed & the believers, &
the fish-taco-loving 20-somethings
with ambitions of overhead
lighting made of glass.



Wednesday June 11th, 2010

He wanted Abraham Lincoln to be tragic.
To not be the joke of a man that he had become.

He wanted to cut Lincoln’s hair, trim his beard, tilt
his head into the basin and push the pads

of his fingers into Lincoln's scalp. "How's
that?" and "He said what?" and maybe

that's all a little later and right now Lincoln
just closes his eyes, let's the tension do somersaults

from his chest to his knees. And he shakes a little
because it's hard to let go. Billiard balls popping

from his chest, rolling down the checkerboard floor
to the back room where six women are waiting

for their hair to dry in translucent beehives. They whisper
to the bees, "What is wrong with him?" "What?"

And Lincoln sits ignorant of bees and their keepers,
preoccupied with the beeswax candy in his hand. Free at the counter.

Dustin puts oil on Lincoln's beard before cutting it with scissors
Down to the skin, then the hot cream, the kind that explodes

with foam in a ceramic bowl with a little water and a brush.
He shaves Lincoln once. Then again, running

the blade against the grain the second time. Following
That with some lotion for the burn. "How's that? Better?"






















Dustin Luke Nelson is a Co-Founding Editor of InDigest and InDigest Editions. He is also a writer/producer for Radio Happy Hour and his poetry has appeared here and there on the Internet and on the not-Internet. He blogs at blogsareaboutego.blogspot.com and takes to heart that a dear friend once said, "The Nile is a river in Egypt. Don't make jokes about it."

At the Bottom of a Shadow: An interview with Kiki Petrosino

It’s very quiet in this room. It feels like
being at the bottom

of a shadow, at the bottom of
a room. (“Question”)

Kiki Petrosino is the author of the poetry collection, Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009). She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in FENCE, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Gulf Coast, Forklift Ohio, and elsewhere. Her poem, "You Have Made a Career of Not Listening," was anthologized in Best New Poets. Her awards include a post-graduate writing fellowship from the University of Iowa and two staff scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has recently moved to Louisville from Iowa City, where she worked for five years as a Program Assistant at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. She is an assistant professor at the University of Louisville, where she teachers literature and creative writing. Check out her author page, featuring a great interview about her work, at Sarabande’s website.



GL: Robert Redford, the comically romantic muse who stars in the first section of your anagrammatically titled and uber-wonderful collection of poems, Fort Red Border, exhibits a mixture of a glib, amorous proficiency and dialogical absurdity—he says the darndest things: "You float around my house all day / just like a little cloud of sweetness." Redford's such an interesting choice for a poetic subject qua beloved because he's so…meretricious. For example, I noticed when watching one of his movies not too long ago that he seemed really adept at putting on and taking off his glasses. That is, he appears to prioritize all the wrong things, have little to no negative capability, and somehow still be appealing. So, did you choose Redford (as your Beatrice) in part because his polished veneer allowed for projection and fantastical extrapolation? Do you think that the speaker's paramnesiac trysts with Redford show us, more often than not, the way that modern love works? That we fall in love with images that allow us to dramatize a monodramatical affair with the self?

KP: Yikes. I hope that we moderns haven’t succeeded in creating a world where love is nothing more than a series of “monodramatical affairs with the self.” The self can be such a stifling, terrifying little locket to cram yourself into. I once heard the poet Dan Beachy-Quick say that love is a leap across empty space. And I believe that for love to work, there ought to be something real on the other side of that leap. But can I confess something? I don’t think the poems in my “Redford” series are love poems at all. And I don’t consider the “Redford” who emerges in those pieces to be a romantic figure, painted in the usual shades of eros (or whatever the silver screen is made out of). I’m glad that you’ve mentioned Beatrice here, because Dante’s journey was on my mind as I wrote these poems. This series came to me during a time in my life when I felt deeply wounded on a bunch of levels. Some of this wounded-ness had to do with romantic love, but most of it was about me learning to accept the circumstances of my life at that point. I think my Redford emerged as a possible answer to my hurt. The certainty that I associated with the Redford archetype was like a cool glass of water or something. The contrast nourished me, and was generative of new thought. For me, the “Redford” poems are artifacts of a highly personal, interior thought process—yep, a long monodramatical affair. So I always hesitate when asked why I “chose” Redford as interlocutor. It didn’t feel like a choice; more like a surfacing. The Redford I found in my poems is really a constellation of desires for lots of things—certainty being chief among them. This is, perhaps, similar to how Beatrice embodies all the virtues that Dante yearns for in his epic. There was a real Beatrice, of course, but that person is not the angelic guide whom Dante crafts into being. That Beatrice, the one who calls Dante by name in Canto XXXI of the Paradiso, represents Dante’s best self, in both a spiritual and artistic sense. And I think Dante knows that all along. He knowingly invests her with all that is good and wise and pure so that he can strive towards that. When we hear Beatrice interrogating Dante, and when Dante answers her in the poem, he’s actually in dialogue with two conflicting aspects of himself. Dante as Seeker. Dante as Keeper of Wisdom. So I’ve always read Dante’s Beatrice—and, for that matter, his Virgil—not as true characters, but as forces that come from within the poet; they give voice to his inner life. I’d like to think that a pale copy of that might happen in my series; that desire gives rise to a revelatory encounter with the imagination, and that this encounter is an opportunity for redemption.

GL: In one of your poems, "Canton Thirteen," you describe "the slender rise of [Redford's] collarbone" as "[making] a ridge / under my cheek, like the worn fishtraps they've found in dry / moat beds near the Tower of London, delicate forked machines / of flint and willow, no bigger than a thmubspan." I remember seeing a poem you wrote as far back as 2003 that featured a reference to fishtraps. I don't know if I remember it correctly, but I believe the poem said something like this: "Love knits a fishtrap loose in water." Why does this image offer you such abiding fascination? And what do fishtraps have to do with love?

KP: You’re right to point out that certain lines tend to stay with me. There really is a very old wicker fishtrap on display at the Tower of London, and when I saw it as a young tourist, I thought, what a beautiful machine. The thing is, I have no idea what fishtraps may have to do with love, which probably explains why it’s taken me multiple poems to work through that image. Perhaps it’s a question of sound. I have to confess that, as a museum-goer, I often find myself more taken with the explanatory notes that accompany an artifact than I am with the artifact itself. The note next to the fishtrap said, “Fishtrap, willow and flint,” which has such a wonderful and wistful sound to it. As if someone were speaking a command, or a wish, into the empty air, and this was the result. As a poet, I’m interested in how desire can bring a world into being. And I’ve learned that the laws of such worlds may have very little to do with objective reality. For example: in my memory, that fishtrap was as transparent as Wonder Woman’s jet. It seemed like nothing more than a white clasp woven from extremely tender shreds of bark. But I just did an image search for “Fishtrap, Tower of London,” and it turns out the real fishtrap resembles a giant Triscuit ™ more than anything else. Awesome! It doesn’t change anything for me. I love them both.

GL: The second section of Fort Red Border, titled Otolaryngology, begins with the prose poem "White." The poem details in stunningly beautiful language the perhaps typical or maybe most essential characteristics and actions of the color/figure White: "White rises from her set of tines…White drags her swordwhite self packed down in rice." White does and is many amazing things, but toward the end of the poem, you write of White that "her broken breath [is] the tree you break yourself against." This line struck me because I remember you using this phrase to describe one of Shakespeare's sonnets; you said something about how one of the sonnets features a "voice that breaks against the rock of itself." At any rate, it seems to be an idea especially important to you: that a poem constructs its own method and means of destroying itself in such a way that reveals ever more meanings while never providing a totalizing account of meaning. In "White," interestingly, the catalog of descriptions and actions enriches our understanding of White, but never finalizes it. We can only guess at White's motivations, and we can only guess at the extent of White's figurative relationship with the color white. Even the last line of the poem promises more violence to come, not closure. White remains an active and dangerous force, but not an agent that helps resolve or fully account for its meaning. Which leads me to wonder if you think (your) poetry is most revealing, dynamic, or moving when it attempts to mean violently, to complicate and/or proliferate meanings, instead of tapering toward some kind of meditative or epiphanic conclusion?

KP: Well, the connection between violence and meaning isn’t something I’ve really considered in relation to my own poetry. But now that you mention it, maybe I am hostile to the notion of fixed definitions. Kiki smash! In fact, one of the first poems I can remember writing was called “Fork,” and it was a series of associative definitions of the word (i.e., “an extension of the tongue,” “an outstretched arm with flaring silver sleeve,” etc.). I chose to lineate the poem in the manner of a dictionary entry and to include a phonetic spelling of “fork.” There was something empowering (to my high-school self) about proliferating the possible meanings of this rather utilitarian word. I felt the same way while writing “White.” We all think we know what “white” means, but it doesn’t just lie there on the page. It’s a word that moves through the world all the time, like a glacier. And like a glacier, it gathers some things into itself and crushes others to smithereens. There are times when white appears to open itself up to our view (“The Great White Way,” “White Light/White Heat,” and my favorite: “Whitesnake”), and there are other moments, particularly in America, when the idea of white excludes (“Whites Only,” “White flight.”) If I took a hole-punch, or a garden spade—or if I drilled through the wall—could I find another way into white? Could I kick down the door and find myself, somehow, in someone else’s white—maybe even your white? The thing is, just when it seems possible to do this—to transgress the definitional boundaries of a word in order to generate new meanings that I like better—that same word will come roaring back at me with a roundhouse kick. For example: when I visited Nigeria a few years ago, I overheard the shopkeepers referring to me as “white.” This is something that wouldn’t happen in America, where I’m a “person of color” due to my mixed heritage. Neither descriptor has anything to do with my actual skin color, but yet here’s this word, this color, this word “white,” that gets all freighted with meaning to the point that it serves as shorthand for a whole host of other physical and cultural attributes. In Nigeria, the word “white” actually had the power to kick my ass, because it showed up and attached itself to me in an unexpected way. It engulfed me for a short time, forcing me into an extremely uncomfortable bear hug. In short, “white” is a word that constantly reminds me that I have not mastered it. It’s an extremely solemn word, because it can be about space and eternity and beauty, but it’s also a dangerous word for those exact same reasons. I can’t fully account for white, but I keep unfolding it. I keep trying to break it open.

GL: Okay. So your poem "Secret Ninja" is something of a crowd pleaser. I've read it to a handful of people over the past month or two and they inevitably love it. But the poem, aside from being tender and funny and inventive, is all about adolescent suffering. The speaker catalogs a number of things she would like "smash," and does smash, I guess, in her imagination--things she hates, things that irritate or perhaps traumatize her, like gym teachers. The speaker wants to enact some kind of clandestine transformation that would render the speaker powerful, magnificent. First, I'd like to know what kind of secret ninja transformation you wanted to enact when you were young? And, second, I wonder if the narrative of such transformations, found in comic books, action flicks and fantasy lit, have affected the way you write?

KP: My dear Greg, I wanted what every young girl wants: a total makeover. The kind of makeover whereby your garden-variety blushing weirdo (who, each day, carefully pins a Starfleet combadge to her uniform blazer) might magically transform into a slender orchid of a lass. I wanted long platinum hair, vanilla-scented shampoo, a Fossil watch, an emerald-green prom dress, and perfect, squared-off teeth. I also wanted a British accent. How I suffered. Certainly, books and movies helped me out. I watched Sabrina about a million times during my high school years, and I still love both the original 1954 film and the 1995 remake. (“I have learnt how to live... how to be in the world and of the world, and not just to stand aside and watch. And I will never, never again run away from life. Or from love, either…”) I don’t know if such films have exerted a direct influence on my writing, but the archetype of transformation—the whole ugly-duckling-becomes-swan-and-proceeds-to-rock-the-mic fantasy—is certainly alive and well in my imagination. As far as writing goes, I believe the page is a realm. It can be a space for enacting transformations in language. It’s good to be confident when you approach the page, but not arrogant. After all, the page will not be impressed by your kicky new haircut and French verbs. The page wants results. I don’t think I’d be a poet now if I hadn’t suffered through my terrifically dorky adolescence. My identity as an outsider forced me to become a good observer of things, and allowed me to cultivate an inner life that continues to sustain me today. Qapla!

GL: The third section of your book is comprised of a series of valentine poems. One of these poems describes the speaker's trip to the butcher's, where she orders "the perfect amount" of meat. The speaker goes on to say that she finds food "ingenious" because she can successfully order "some of the food" and "Not [just] any food"; that is, she can get exactly what she wants. But with love, well, "You can't order some of the love" because "you get the wrong love" or "the wrong amount." Were the valentine poems an attempt to grapple with and explore this problem: trying to order a certain kind of love and rarely-to-never getting what you want? If not, please set me straight.

KP: The conceit that governs those lines came from my early study of French. In that language, you can’t just say that you want to buy (for example) some cheese; you have to say that you want “some of the cheese.” In other words, you have to stake out a claim to your personal smidgen of cheese as separate from the total amount of cheese that exists in the universe (“Je voudrais du fromage”). In an instant, the particularity of what you want is juxtaposed against the totality of what’s possible. This contrast reminds you that you’re just a speaker in the midst of a larger system. You can’t have all the cheese in the universe (says French) but not for the reasons you think. You can’t have all the cheese because the truth of cheese—the cheese—is so huge that it belongs to everyone. The cheese belongs to French (says French) but maybe you can have a little. If you ask politely. It’s all very reassuring, at least to the non-native speaker. But when we move to matters of the heart, you’re right: Cupid doesn’t take special orders. Like artistic inspiration, true love probably belongs to the realm of the unspeakable. Just as there are some poems that seem to drift from view the more you try to pin them to the page, true love must surface in its own way.

GL: It's been a couple years now since Fort Red Border was published, and even longer since you wrote many of these poems--some of them date back to 2004, right? So, what direction has work drifted in since? Are you writing more Redfordian poems--fantastical narrative/dramatic poems--more self-broken, sound-conscious poems like "Or," new stuff that fuses these modes, or Planet Weird poems that defy categorization. In short, what are you working on these days and how's that going?

KP: Right now, I’m working steadily on a new manuscript of poems and adjusting to some exciting career changes. This past fall, I joined the faculty at the University of Louisville, so I now have the chance to teach and write full time. I’m also co-editing a new electronic journal of poetry, Transom, which I launched with fellow poet Dan Rosenberg. In January 2011, a new chapbook of mine, The Dark is Here, was published by Forklift, Ink. And this past April, The New York Times published my poem, “Allergenesis,” as part of a spring-themed Op Ed page. These days, it feels good to write poems that don’t mention the pronoun “I.” It’s great fun to escape from the locket of the self, to explore other terrain in language. Repetition and musical incantation remain important to me, so some of my new poems attempt to thread particular sounds together. Sometimes I do find myself returning to the fantastical narrative/dramatic realm, and I’m working on a series of prose poems featuring a recurring character called “the eater.” I’m several poems into that series now, and I’m not sure where the eater wants to go next—maybe nowhere. For the past few months, I’ve just been writing one poem at a time and liking that phenomenon. Mostly I’m trying to listen and follow my intuition rather than force poems onto the page. It’s a process of seeking and revelation.

To Make It Matter Again: An Interview with Michelle Taransky

Michelle Taransky was born in Camden, NJ. Winner of the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize for Barn Burned, Then, selected by Marjorie Welish, Taransky lives in Philadelphia where she works at Kelly Writers House, is Reviews Editor for Jacket2, and teaches writing at University of Pennsylvania and Temple University.

GL: I’d like to talk about the epigraphs to your book (or more specifically, to the first half of your book) since these two particular quotations seem to have an especially ars poetical function for your work. One is from George Oppen and one is from Charles Bernstein. Oppen’s goes something like this: I seem to know what I mean to do, and seem to be myself; I would like to get the thing said, I would like rather to get it thought, to grasp it—I look at things and they become large, like barns, I feel lost and yet they are not big enough—merely a little clumsy, reminiscent and clumsy. And Bernstein’s pithier contribution: I care about poetry that disrupts business as usual. The Oppen quotation (an excerpt from a letter he wrote to Frederic Will) seems to position the barn as a figure indicative of potentially visionary perception in your work (perhaps a fundamental aspiration), while the Bernstein quotation obviously has more mischievous and critical implications. In other words, one epigraph is constructive while the other is deconstructive. Could you tell me about these two (conflicting? complimentary?) impulses in your work? And could you also tell me why you selected these two particular quotations to introduce your work?

MT: For me, these epigraphs foregrounded the poems as both processes and events, the materials and the things. They suggest, or introduce, the barn's potential to be both archetype and particular.

Oppen positions the barn as a figure, the barn as many barns, and the barn as a holder of the unknown. To approach the barn like Oppen was, for me, a way to come to know the strange, as well as the stranger. "I never knew any barns," Oppen writes later in the same letter to Will, "If there were any barns in my background it seems to me that I would be writing at this moment about barns--- It occurs to me that many people have."

The Bernstein quotation continues: "I care most for poetry as dissent, including formal dissent, poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are otherwise not articulated [...] by form I mean ways of putting things together, or stripping them apart, I mean ways for accounting for what weighs upon any one of us." I wanted to deal with this counting and accounting Bernstein points to by writing without a "predictable measure." It's this choice that continues to disrupt while revealing that thinking and looking closely may be a clumsy business, and that it's ok to care.

GL: In Bob Perlman’s astute and enthusiastic blurb on the back of Barn Burned, Then, he credits your “fluency in frame-scanning, collage, and abstractions to alert readers to the depth of tinder we live amid.” It’s a lovely bit of analysis, but I’d like to hear about the techniques of “frame-scanning and collage.” How did the use of such techniques influence the composition of the poems?

MT: The poems move the barn and the bank from their original locations---- these jumps in frame and context and place ---- they make clear that "techniques" are being used, are a part of this work, are included in these operations. The poems, like barns and banks, are constructed, made things, where thinking through is a visible element like a nail or beam or joint or brace.

GL: Your book, as I alluded to earlier, is split into two sections: “Burn Book” and “Bank Book.” Could you tell me a little bit about the bifurcated structure of the book as a whole? Why did you want to keep the barns and banks (at least partially, nominally) separate from one another?

MT: The thing is: I separated them. But (as you note) they are, at the same time, not separate. Just as a field can flood, a barn can burn, or a calf can get sick, there may be a run on the bank or a robbery. When I started the project, I knew the barn had burned. But, I did not consider the bank then, it wasn't there then.

The bank began to figure itself during an indepentant study I was doing with the amazing Dee Morris at Iowa: "Poetries of the Left." We were reading Cary Nelson's Revolutionary Memory project and I came across this line from Genevieve Taggard: "They sold the calf. That fall the bank took over." That line changed the incomplete narrative implied by the title: "the barn burned, then ..." to "the barn burned, then there was a bank." Grammatically, the "then" in the title is a conjunctive adverb meant to connect: to join words, phrases, clauses and ideas. The Taggard line that repairs the broken speech and moves the narrative forward is among those shifts where the working it out "made the bank take place."

While writing Barn Burned, Then, I discovered all sorts of ways barns and banks may be linked in the poem--- and I discovered all sorts of ways barns and banks are linked in the world, including: there is both a barn swallow and a bank swallow, there is a barn called a bank barn, and there is a bank called Farmer's Bank. I think this means there are more links, in both the poem and the world.

GL: Part of what’s at stake in this fascinating collection is an analysis, or exploration of the dubious and exploitative foundations of our economy—the way we, or those of us complicit in our political and financial power centers look for “A way to get more for less. To stock up on the stolen / For the shortage that is always coming again” (“Theory for Building Where Fault”). There’s a spirit of philosophical and political critique in this book, but at the same time the book is far from polemical, in part, I think, because your poems are skeptical of maintaining any one particular rhetorical strategy for too long. The poems are full of un- or semi-punctuated, enjambed lines and phrases (Perloff’s “floating modifiers”), fragments of language juxtaposed against complete sentences, etc. How do you manage to use language that so complicates our ordinary patterns of speech (which “disrupts business as usual”) as a vehicle of political and philosophical critique?

MT: In a conversation with Sarah Louise Green (The Offending Adam issue 13), we suggest the "the beggar's way of speaking" (from "The Bank Holds") as the book's description of it's method of telling (or not telling). This is the kind of speech that asks with each breath: at what cost? Here, language (like barns and banks), is not safe from disaster and its disruptions. Here, the stutter of saying it (wanting to or having to) and associated anxieties get into the work and the working out it proposes. Like the poems press the impulse to hoard up against an impending loss, the full sentence being beside the fragment might mark the ways language is or is not an available currency.

GL: So what does Michelle Taransky make of the contemporary poetry scene? What kinds of writers, publications and projects are you taken with at present? What trends and tendencies in contemporary poetry do you find most intriguing? Contrarywise, what aspects, if any, of contemporary poetry do you find troubling?

MT: The work CA Conrad is doing in Philadelphia is amazing. His Urchin series, which gathers poets in public places in Philadelphia to read the work of poets like Niedecker, Oppen, O'Hara, and Spicer animates a community of writers as active readers that is continually nourishing and informative. If you haven't read (or tried) his (Soma)tic Exercises, stop reading this interview now and go right now to this (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises page. Send me your poem. Write your own (soma)tic exercise and send it to me. Philadelphia is full of innovative programming: the EMERGENCY reading series curated by Sarah Dowling and Julia Bloch, that engage poets in dialogues about emergence and poetic communities; the New Philadelphia Poets consistent push for poetry to happen in more and more places around the city; as well as Kelly Writers House's energetic revisioning of reading format and what is or is not possible for writing programs. It's a joy to write in this city among so many other poets who love writing.

GL: So what’s new with Michelle Taransky these days? What’s the next great project that your cooking up in your poetry laboratory? Who are you reading these days? Watcha thinkin’ about? Do tell.

MT: I'm working on two series of poems: SORRY WAS IN THE WOODS, and EPHRAIM GOLDBERG.

My father (an architect) and I are at work on a public project: the WPA: Whitman Park Artpsace. To be built adjacent to Walt Whitman's house in Camden, NJ. the WPA's mission includes fostering and supporting the literary arts in and around Camden. We're also working on a series of transcribed walking pieces built around buildings in Philadelphia and Camden.

The books and treasures on my coffee table: Neighbour by Rachel Levitsky (Ugly Duckling Press), Sarah Dowling's first book Security Posture (Snare Books), Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen edited by Shoemaker (University of Alabama Press), the noulipian analects (Les Figues press), aaaaaaaaaaalice by Jen Karmin (Film Forum Press), HOW by Emily Pettit (Octopus Books).

Two Poems by Tony Mancus

Break even on the coin

—I say the word
you agreed upon
and now that we’re here: page crinkle,
a golf course hearsed
into a vineyard—balls teed

suppose this freight weighed
as much as dollars in coin.
As much word
as what carried wood’s
left behind. Forget the shot length
and the bag of talking sticks.

What’s now camera’d and circumstantial:
mantra, medina, occipital, medulla, oblong

I can’t make you know me better
than science. Ozymandias either. Poor dustbowl.

The bag’s disposed of, my coat hangs
limp without me. Interminable hunger at the sight
of it. Interminable hunger of arms
and all things parceled.
Think a lot of East, of Eden, think
a lot of laurel
and then of whinnying—a way through
the long afternoon’s thirst.

Who would want to eat here. The horses halve themselves
and go on display. We are not. Art no longer
available. On access: the Ah-ha video plays all night long:

Take on me take on
my thanks love, my thanks
for beaning me in the middle
of the street—a proper form of solitude.

For one dog might refuse any number of others
dependant on mood or the color patterns
invisible to its hairy eyes. We decide to be
confused and the doors to the train reflect
all of the other possibilities this city could hold
for each of us.

I am we here. You are the television’s
burbling and pale blue light or fluorescence—
a harbor view of the kitchen
laid bare with construction equipment.

Simply put, my perspective carries
your refraction
and that means the bridge between us, its bigtop lighting,
a set of teeth in a bag for when
something needs to be bitten. Some cite another path through—
a squirrel say or a person
limping the crosswalk or the millions
of dollars paid to the bridge’s intestines.
Keep flickering.

The nation of a dollar. Coined:
a thousand fuses short to make the commute
more bear-than-able and after
there are individual and startling pops

it’s like we’re not         could not even inhabit
the same plans—how bright and cold it gets



The mystery of bending

I’m going to blow the socks
off the water. Here’s a tea

pot boiling, bags wait
to be saturated so they can

share what’s inside them. With
our mouths properly inhabited, we

have a total jaw full
of bony protrusions

things that we’ll eventually
lose or have to have worked on.

This body is a cave
of wonderful aches

and production methods. I am writing
what I want less and less. In the same way

the wind picks up speed
between skyscrapers, the compass

points everywhere at once:
under the illusion

that its exploding. I’ve taken to sewing
a necklace of earphones that muffle

out round our rising chests. Money
gets tumbled clean and art

is impossible to make from a field
of doughy-eyed marionettes.

No politics set in on my top
hat or on this the best first sentence

for a new idea of the novel:
do you know, my lieutenant,

the war is another thing we cannot
touch. So our company stayed put

drunk as every bottled ship, as every
kernel of corn drawn white and out

from itself by hot and unstirred wind,
as every hand that claps itself to sleep, drunk

in the notion of deserving what comes next.
A generation of light sleepers learn their emotions

and park them right
in our faces, so we’re lost

but we recognize the cardinal
directions. The search for true

north takes a long time.
It’s surely no picnic.




Tony Mancus lives in Rosslyn, VA with his fiance and a chinchilla. He teaches writing and literature at Emerson Prep and runs creative writing workshops with Writopia Lab DC. He is cofounder of Flying Guillotine Press and prefers sleep to pancakes, though pancakes can be enticing. Some of his poems can be found online at 42Opus, No Tell Motel, H_ngm_n, CUE, keepgoing.org and elsewhere.

More Pepper Than Salt: a response to Joy Katz's "A Desk."

Peter Ramos’ poems appear in Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, The Chattahoochee Review, and Poet Lore. He is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), and two chapbooks: Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003).

Peter Ramos' essay, as noted in the title, responds to Joy Katz's poem "A Desk." quoted in its entirety below.


A Desk.


Solicitous of its own business. Not chewable, and never mordant.
How to say a desk as I would say a hand? I look out
from the brows: wooden, unaltering.
Perhaps a desk is more important.
Perhaps I cannot have a sentence without a desk,
more pepper than salt, more violà. Perhaps in life
one does not discover a desk enough—its cruelty and trousers—
simple as a line of dancers, full of bone.

Is a desk modestly a field?
No: a turnstile, an airplane wing.

You can count on railroad bridges, on cut celery.
You can count on the flatness of bateau,
on all that is not the flesh, such as a deck of cards.

The boxes fit one inside the next, the cutlery is put away,
sturdy to push on as bike pedals. All this belongs to the desk,
and a berm awash with tide—all things at rest,
not panicked or insane.
As if the heavy telephones were back.

--Joy Katz, from The Garden Room


Peter's essay is the first in a series of "Expositions," in which poets present brief essays on either a single poem or a small group of poems...

***

It’s almost not a poem. At least it doesn’t fit the model I usually hold up: most poems begin with a scene that is then destabilized and then, finally, resolved—in some fashion, either by the passage of time or the arrival of some epiphany—as in, say, Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which the sun sets by the poem’s end, and the speaker has gone from addressing the historical moment in which he is situated to confronting those readers of future generations taking in the poem long after the speaker has passed away; or in Dickinson’s “465” (“I Heard a Fly Buzz when I died”), in which the speaker’s death-bed expectations for the coming of Christ—or wisdom or final illumination—are horribly undercut by her/his ultimate and final sensation: the carnal, decadent, insistent, small and defiantly non-transcendental noise of a fly.

Katz’s poem, by contrast, doesn’t really begin in one place and end up somewhere else. Nor does the poem seem to resolve anything like a conflict or tension. In this, and other ways, it resembles Gertrude Stein’s most compelling work (for me, anyway), the shorter prose poems of Tender Buttons. In fact, Katz’s use of the period in the title/phrase makes the allusion seem intentional. And, like Stein, Katz takes up the otherwise drab, commonplace items usually associated with the domestic sphere—food, linen closets, coffee, desks—and transforms them, makes them appear strange, magical, out of context. It’s tempting to read this as a critique of the domestic sphere—of the place socially constructed and designated to accommodate a patriarchy. But that’s too simple a reading. This poem is about establishing a ground, a solid surface on which a self or subject can establish itself as a self, from which that self can then greet and make the world. Yet the poem contains both aspects: a launching pad and flight, the latter inconceivable without the former. But flight can only be imagined or anticipated here—what the “turnstile” or “airplane wing” will precipitate. The ground must be receptive and innocuous—neither imposing nor critical—and also trustworthy—“sturdy” and “full of bone.” That something so simple—a wooden desk—can be so valuable, so essential also reminds us of the times in which we live: where a place for silence and meditation is threatened by the speed and distractions of living in this era—with our apparent dependence on email and cell phones, on various pressing and immediate obligations. The desk is “not panicked or insane./ As if the heavy telephones were back.”

In terms of meter, the poem maintains a wonderful conversational quality that keeps the bouncy anapests and dactyls almost hidden: “MORE PEPPer than SALT...Is a DESK MODestly.” The rhymes, too, move just beneath the surface, internal and aslant, innocuous, insistent, and essential as the desk itself: “solicitous/ business”; “brows/ trousers/dancers”; “flatness/ bateau/ back”; “desk/rest.” It’s as if, somehow, especially in this age of spectral distractions, there is still a need for something simple, solid, and dependable, on which and from which to cast the nets of our imagination.

The Edge of Awake: An interview with Peter Ramos

...Here's the edge of awake--

Cocktails, pack of matches, somebody's face

Watery-familiar. Hi, there, stranger.

Here's to being up for something beautiful,

Regrettable, and sore. ("John Berryman in My Dreams")

Peter Ramos’ poems appear in Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, The Chattahoochee Review, and Poet Lore. He is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), and two chapbooks: Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003).

GL: Your first book of poems, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost, opens with a piece called “John Berryman in My Dreams,” in which, as the reader might expect, you channel Berryman’s dream-song voice. Your own early 21st century version of Henry discovers that now “Henry’s famous, even hip,” easily recognizable to his adorers in Chinese joints and bars, where Henry hunts for sensuous gratification: food, booze, sex. The last three lines of this poem are a come on of sorts, a seedy salutation that makes the reader wonder if he or she should turn back: “Hi there, stranger, / here’s to being up for something beautiful, / regrettable and sore.” It seems like you’re deploying Berryman’s Henry as a brief Virgil for this book in order to color your approach to a number of issues and themes in your work: the relationship between poetry and autobiography, exploring extreme psychological states, and working with short, emotionally violent lyric forms, to name just a few. The poem is efficient for these reasons but it’s also a little dangerous since the person at the door, in this case, isn’t really (not quite exactly) you. So. Why choose this beautiful poem, which is an attempt to veer away from self through impersonation, imitation, etc, as the piece to inaugurate Please Do Not Feed the Ghost? What advantages does writing as Berryman (sort of) provide you when you’re simultaneously trying to welcome and warn the reader?

PR: First, thanks for taking the time to ask me these thoughtful questions. This, like the rest of them, is challenging. To try and make a long explanation shorter, let me say that I didn’t take (reading and writing) poetry seriously until my first year at college. At that time (1987), the Confessionals and the Deep Image poets, even though they were over twenty years old, were still new enough not to be taken up into academia; that is, those few of us interested in poetry read them on our own, in part because they were not assigned in the curriculum. As such, these poets held great power for me: I’m talking about the big ones—Lowell, Plath, Sexton, James Wright, Merwin, Roethke, and maybe Kinnell. And the Freudian idea that you could exorcize your own trauma through art—art as therapy—was still acceptable. Although I moved away from these poets and these ideas, they have always stuck with me in some minor but essential way, un-hip, or outmoded as they seem today. I didn’t discover Berryman until much later, in my PhD program. I’d always known he was loosely associated with the Confessionals, but his work struck me as so much more reliant on art, or artifice—in all the best ways. With Henry and Mr. Bones, he reinforced the idea for me that the “self” in art (which is what we’re talking about, the place where this kind of self matters) has room to be grotesque, clownish, a minstrel, a liar. I think part of the reason the Deep Imagists and the Confessionals went out of vogue—after such a long heyday—was because poets and critics began to doubt what language could do; a skepticism arose I think in the early to mid 1990s, or we might a skepticism about language itself that was there a long time suddenly became accepted by most people in academia and the literary arts: language, at best, can only play. The signifier does not and cannot secure the signified. But I could never accept the kind of poetry that is, by this point, falsely associated with the avant-garde, the stuff one reads in many, many journals today where the language is so mutilated, so reduced to linguistic rubble that one can’t find the tension or essential drama of the poem. I understand that the plain narrative form still holds sway in places like The New Yorker. But that’s like saying rock and roll is still hegemonic and popular since it’s doing so well in Las Vegas. In terms of actual poetry journals, poetic techniques that privilege distance—through irony or cleverness—and narrative opacity, and fragmentation have become pretty conventional. In doses, it’s great. I love Stein, Bernstein et al. But I think too often bad imitations of that style—like nth-generation LANGUAGE poetry—allow people the opportunity to give sloppy work the dignity of being considered innovative. In his Dream Songs, Berryman seems to accomplish both: personal trauma, with its implicit dramatic tension, and a playfulness of language, a “black” humor that unsettles even as it makes us laugh. I get the sense of there being a person connected to all those wild language tricks—someone suffering terribly, and in his case the irony or humor or non-sequiturs somehow bring the reader closer to that suffering without allowing the poems to become false or sentimental. It seems to me then (and of course I am no Berryman) that if Berryman could be a confessional poet by substituting these strange characters for his “self,” then I too could use that technique at an even farther remove. Poet and critic Andy Franzee, in a generous review of my book for the Verse online blog, said that, “Ramos takes up what continues to make [Robert Lowell’s] Life Studies important: a recognition that selfhood is never self-contained, but is a performance that operates within, is even constructed by, the demands of family, desire, and national life—demands which in the work of both poets may take place years before their births.” I’m flattered by the comparison, and I wouldn’t necessarily place myself alongside with Lowell. But I did have this idea in mind when I wrote these poems, including the Berryman one. And he seemed like the perfect “character” to invite the reader into the collection; his persona as it appears in Henry is full of the contradictions I wanted to explore—locked into an influential and necessary but perilous past, charming but destructive, intimate but untrustworthy.

GL: One of my favorite poems in this collection is a generational piece called “Short Waves,” which probes the ancient lyric relationship between suffering and song. It begins with this metaphor: “Lonely son of a drinker, my father slept / uneasily, his throat swollen with a delicate creature—” an avian manifestation of suffering, trauma and music, which later forces the speaker’s father to “cough[] up feathers.” Equally delicate is your treatment of the subject of the illicit encounters between father and son, who are the speaker’s grandfather and father respectively. The language in this poem is so musical, and the imagery so lush, even, at times, artfully typical, that the reader sometimes (and briefly) wonders if these sexual assaults weren’t more spiritually and artistically generative than they were damaging. In the fourth and final stanza of the poem, though, the speaker describes the tender wreckage of his father as he appears in a photograph: “Glazed and drunk, / his face wrung out at last, my father strains. / He almost sings.” Here again, images of personal ruin, pain and beauty are forced to coexist. Why? What is the source of beauty in the speaker’s father’s story, since this man is so clearly a tragic subject? And is this traumatic encounter from the past, and from Venezuela, the most important psychological import that speaker’s forbears have brought to the new world?

PR: That’s an old poem compared to many of the others in the book. And here let me admit that the poem alludes to many autobiographical or “true” events in my life—the father in the poem is very much like my real father, although exaggerated of course. At the time I first began writing this one, I felt that compared to other fathers I knew, mine seemed more withdrawn, more unassuming; he is a child of an alcoholic and at that time he was going to “Al Anon”—for children and loved ones of alcoholics—a helpful experience that also dredged up a lot of his painful past. I kind of experienced that vicariously. I’m not the child of an alcoholic, but we have our fair share on both sides of my family. And I know the symptoms of such children; they often grow up with shame and guilt for things they never did. I’m not sure if your question limits itself to the poem or to my life, but I would say that my father moved to the States when he was thirty, married my mother (an Anglo-Saxon American) and helped raise me and my brother here (in the States). He never spoke Spanish to us because he believed that it would interfere with our assimilating, a forgivable mistake. And I think being the child of an alcoholic played into his own insecurities as a foreigner—this was the 60s and 70s, historically before whatever multi-culturalism trends came into some kind of vogue. So, the lack of translation, as it were, the lack (or limited amount) of Spanish language or culture in our house, comes from a similar kind of insecurity or sense of inadequacy. And when I was writing the poem, I thought that in many ways, my father’s experience of being the son of an alcoholic, as well as an immigrant, took away his dignity. That’s what the beauty remedies; and really I believe poetry has this function of bestowing dignity and visibility and humanity to the otherwise marginalized or invisible: I think of Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” for example. At the time I was reading poems by Bruce Weigl. He has one called “The Impossible” in which the speaker remembers some horrible event: when he was young, an older man, a stranger, forces him to give the man oral sex. It’s violent, of course, and the older man slaps the child’s face. But then, mysteriously, the speaker remembers the man’s small hands, and the gentle way he held his (the boy’s) head during the act. The last line of the poem is “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” It’s as if in order to love himself again, the speaker has to love even this most traumatic, violent event he suffered since it—the event and his survival of it—has become such a large part of who he is. I read an interview with Weigl in a journal (Phoebe, spring 1993), and he said that he also considered using the line “Say it beautifully and you make it clear.” I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but looking back, I’m sure I was influenced by that poem when I wrote “Short Waves.” It seems like they’re both trying to do the same thing.

GL: The title of your poetry collection, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost, implies that ghosts are angry, uncivilized quasi-animals, best kept at bay or at least appeased. It also implies that the past, in the shape of ghosts, can become suddenly charged and transformed through the incitements and aggravations caused by the living. Could you tell me a little bit about how you came up with the title for this book, and how it functions as a marquee for the poems therein?

PR: Sometimes it’s hard to explain poems and their titles, and even though this title seems easy to figure out now, I wasn’t sure what it meant when I came up with it. Growing up I felt there were two very powerful spirits that came to me over which I had no control: a life spirit and a death spirit. The one I associated with spring, the other with autumn—a bit cliché, I admit, but it felt real to me. When I later read William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All and then The Descent of Winter, I took both very personally. My title is nothing like Williams’ Descent, but I had the same idea—the loamy earth, like the autumn, calling us back down from the heights, down to the murky, intoxicating bog of memories, nostalgia, the irrecoverable, apparently safe and ever longed for past—it’s really a kind of death wish. The past is no place to linger; obsessively yearning for it is no different than getting drunk every night, or watching hours and hours of bad television, or binging on junk food.

As others have mentioned, the book’s title itself announces a dual and, in a way, contradictory command the poems therein implicitly perform: don’t get caught up in your own past; you must go back and deal with the ghosts of your past in order to live in the present. Turning one’s past into a ghost to be viewed but warned about, as in zoo animals, seemed like a good way to set up this dance, this dancing around autobiography. On the one hand, what really happened or happens to the poet is irrelevant: who cares what my daddy did to my mommy when I was six? On the other, you need some kind of drama or tension in a poem, as in all forms of art, and if you can channel some personal trauma in a convincing way, it’s one kind of dynamo the poem can plug into. Also, I find the tension that results from the impossibility of completely resolving that traumatic past works well in the poem: you must go back to the past without getting caught up in it in order to resolve it. And you realize that this is impossible. But you must do it anyway.

In the book, the past covers a specific historical moment: the fold between and including the forward looking optimism of the U.S. right around the time of (and in the fifteen years following) World War II, and the inevitable skepticism of the 60s that followed it. Historically I was born in the latter era (1969), but my first impressions are of a country still caught in that fold. Rilke writes (in his Letters to a Young Poet) that poets spend the rest of their lives trying to crystallize their earliest memories—in part because they occur at the threshold of language acquisition and as such are hauntingly unclear or ill-defined; poetically this means such impressions usually contain elements of what Keats called Negative Capability—a kind of pleasurable uncertainty or mystery. So the speaker in many of these poems (of course “me,” to the extent that we are always constructed of a constellation of fictions) is haunted by a past which threatens to overwhelm him/her, yet which must be confronted for various unavoidable reasons.

I’ve been reading your book, and I see what seems to me a similar technique throughout it. In at least a few poems, the speaker ends up back in what seems to be his hometown: Scranton, PA—ghostly rustbelt of his past, made almost gothic twice, both by the passage of time in his own life, and by the economic political realities of the country. Yet in one of my favorite poems, “Scranton Considers Reviving the Coal Industry,” you have a speaker who is asked to perform a similar, similarly impossible, task: the aldermen of the town make him go back into the coal mines and take up the work that has been abandoned for all these years. The final couplet has the speaker saying, “You couldn’t pay me/ to go down there”; and then we get “and they don’t.” For me, this means the speaker has no choice in the matter. Payment implies a transaction—work for money—based on choice. Why would the speaker here feel forcibly compelled to revive Scranton’s coal industry, single handedly? The industry failed long ago, and the speaker won’t even be paid for the work. I’m reminded of that terrific song, by Bruce Springsteen, called “My Hometown.” It’s tempting to hear the lyrics as a sentimental, even jingoistic paean to the singer’s small American hometown (I love John Melloncamp, but this description is much closer to his “I Was Born in a Small Town.”). But if you listen carefully to Bruce’s song, you discover that the singer is full of self-recrimination. He feels painfully guilty for all the failures of his town. What an enormous responsibility he takes on—to blame himself for his hometown’s racial hate crimes, failing economy, social and physical decay. And yet, we are responsible for our towns, as much as we are for our histories and past. I guess an example closer to our craft, writing not song, would be Randall Jarrell’s prose work, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” I read this last summer, but it seems so tied to what many of the Confessional, mid-century poets were doing that I feel as if I’ve known it and been influenced by it for years.

GL: “Watching Late-Night Hitchcock,” presented in “24 frames,” takes up almost a third of the book. This poem offers said number of short to very short poems that alternately report on or address the speaker’s different family members and appropriate or imitate language from film. What was the genesis of this poem? And, given that “Watching Late-Night Hitchcock” was published as a chapbook and, thus, stands on its own as a collection, how does it interact with and speak to the other poems in Please Do Not Feed the Ghost?

PR: I guess most of us can admit that our poems begin so far back—as experience, memories, impressions—that there’s no way to accurately locate the starting point. But in terms of getting this poem down in words, I stared writing about my great-grandmother (on my mother’s side) when I was in college. She was a well-educated, tough and elegant New England matriarch born in the nineteenth century. She was frigid and authoritative, and I guess I’ve always thought of poetry as having similar qualities: true, clear and hard as ice, dazzling but cold. And also, somehow, essentially feminine. My favorite poems by Wallace Stevens are like that, illuminating, inhumanly cold, but necessary, fertile and supreme. And of course Dickinson’s work is full of these qualities. I stopped writing poems about my great-grandmother after college and focused my writing more on my father’s culture, side of the family, etc. This was while I was in the MFA during the mid 90s. But in 2001, I was half way through my PhD, and that summer, I was living in the house where I grew up, studying for my oral exams. I had to read something like 60 books—poetry, fiction, and philosophy. In terms of writing poetry, I work best when I’m reading a lot—“no input, no output,” as Joe Strummer used to say. So, I’d stay up all night reading Wallace Stevens, and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, and Stein, and William Carlos Williams, and Walter Benjamin until my head was full of their voices. Then I’d just wander through the empty house at dawn, a house full of paintings of my mother’s mother and grandmother. At one point I really felt like Norman Bates, a fantasy I’ve had before, a kind of mamma’s boy, now an adult, roaming through the empty house he grew up in, with a head full of ghosts. It was terrific—that feeling of having voices in your head that you trust, that are bigger than you, older than you. So that was really how the Hitchcock poem began. I’ve never been able to duplicate the intensity of that experience. But looking back on my favorite poems of mine, they usually begin as someone else’s voice in my head.

It’s true the poem came out in a chapbook first, but I felt like most of the issues or qualities of the poem seem similar to, or in dialogue with, the other poems I collected for the full-length book: early- to mid-century Americana, family trauma, booze, sex. But it’s also very matriarchal—the feminine voice of authority. All the men in my book are childish drunks, and the women have to tell them what to do, take care of them.

GL: You’ve written cogently about the intersection of Deep Image poetry and translation of Spanish language poems, specifically Wright’s translations of Vallejo’s poems, in your scholarly work. It seems as though you sometimes come close to proffering so-called deep images in your poems, but in the “personal” and historical contexts of family narratives and confessional vignettes rather than in the snowfields of the Midwest, as we are wont to see from Wright and Bly. And, your work is also very conscious of the causality of generations—how family stories lead into and affect, and sometimes afflict, the now, which is how the cultural past translates into the personal present. Could you tell me a little bit about how Deep Image poetry, notions of translation, and your exploration of origins all come together in your work?

PR: That’s a great question I’ve never thought about, and I’m not sure how to answer it. Starting with Deep Image poetry, I don’t tend to go back to those poets very often, though I do read James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break every few seasons. That’s probably the most impressive book I’ve ever read. I’m guessing, from what I know of your own poetry and background, you probably had a similar experience with it. The first time I read “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio,” I walked around for a week in a daze. I don’t even like football, but I memorized the poem and just repeated it to myself all the time. How the hell did he write that?

In terms of translation, I must admit that my Spanish is fair to middling; as you note, I’ve written critically about translation, but I’ve never published my own poetic attempts at it. But I do think I translate other aspects of my father’s culture into my own work. Although my father never taught my brother and me Spanish, there were many different languages spoken in my house when we were growing up. My father knows French from living in Beirut, Lebanon during his teens, and so he and my mother spoke it when they didn’t want us to know what they were saying. Plus, whenever we visited my father’s family in Venezuela, which was almost every Christmas, no one there spoke English, so my brother and I ended up speaking “Spanglish” with our cousins. And of course, when my father spoke to friends and relatives on the phone, which was almost every night, he would use French, Spanish, and Arabic—sometimes all three in one sentence. Though this was initially a source of shame whenever my friends were around to witness this crazy foreign language-soup, I eventually realized there were advantages to such an upbringing. For one thing, it’s a nurturing environment for someone who eventually wants to be a writer. This linguistic, cultural interface or confrontation tends to illuminate the extent to which language itself is a material, to be manipulated in new and often strange ways. The immigrant tongue, however diluted or marginalized in the new country, nonetheless bleeds through in ways that call attention to the very pliable nature of language itself. In my adolescence, for example, whenever my father wanted me to feel special guilt for my poor academic performance, he would say, “Your mother and I pay a lot of money for you to go to this school. But a lot!” In Spanish, the conjunction would make sense—a way of emphasizing the first part of the statement. In English, it sounds funny. Such syntactically strange sayings were a source of shame for us, growing up. And yet, they personalize my father; the older I get, the more endearing his awkward language constructions and translations seem.

The second quality produced by this kind of linguistic/cultural confrontation seems more related to the U.S.-born children of immigrants: a keen awareness of the dominant language and culture they have been born into and yet feel somehow partially (and, to them, shamefully) barred from. Julio Marzán describes this phenomenon as it applied to the poet William Carlos Williams, whose mother was Puerto Rican. According to Marzàn, Williams chose to be called “Bill” at a young age (and for the rest of his life) as a means of gaining acceptance from his surroundings—those outside of his childhood home, that is—and to avoid being considered “foreign” by the community; it was a kind of persona he took on, a way of being re-born as an Anglo American. In fact, considering that such large numbers of the U.S. population either come from immigrants or are themselves immigrants, Williams’s case seems perfectly common. And however ambivalent immigrants or their family members feel about the process of assimilating into U.S. culture—however much guilt, shame or resentment is involved—the fact remains: assimilation is such a common process, so widely shared by so many U.S. citizens throughout history, it has itself become part of our culture. It’s no wonder so many works of “American literature”—Goodbye, Columbus; The House on Mango Street; How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, to name just a few—have this very process as their central theme. At the level of language, however, the linguistic confrontations that make up the assimilation process engender in immigrants and their children new ways of articulating the American experience.

GL: You’re part of a generation of poets whose writing life has straddled the eras of print- and electronically-dominated poetry publications. The acknowledgments page in Please Do Not Feed the Ghost features credits from both print and digital journals. During the time that you’ve been writing, how has poetry changed because of technology? And do you favor or tremble before the nature of these changes in the current poetic-cultural landscape?

PR: Well, of course there are many advantages to the changes you speak of: poets have more venues in which to showcase their work; they can meet one another more easily on the web. I found your work online, and then I just found your email address and wrote you—all in the space of a few hours, which was great. That must happen all the time. And there are some terrific blogs and journals on the web now—H_NGM_N, elimae, yours, and others’. There are many advantages, but I guess accessibility is the greatest. On the other hand, and I know I’ll sound like a curmudgeon here, I don’t entirely trust all this Exciting, Revolutionary electronic communications technology. I started teaching (adjunct-ing) at the college level in 1994. At that time my students, like myself, were pretty new to the internet, to email, etc. And all these people, even folks in academia, were shouting, “students are writing letters again! Students are writing again!” And yet we have to admit that students now—who grew up writing emails—are not, for the most part, better writers than those of previous generations. I sometimes feel that all these new forms of communicating to one another encourage a kind of A.D.D. and grunt-speak—OMG! LOL!—and a real laziness toward engaging in long texts and critical thinking. You see it in poetry, too. All these poems that jump from fragmented “thought” to “thought” without any glue or cohesion, any sustained “argument” or narrative. You just can’t imagine “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” being written today, for what that’s worth. Or maybe I’d say that while this new technology doesn’t make students or poets worse writers, it can’t take the place of literacy, of reading and learning from all those poets who have contributed to the very tradition poets necessarily engage—consciously or not—when they write, or close reading skills, skills that take time and effort to acquire and master.

GL: So what’s new with Peter Ramos these days? Are you busy destroying the old Peter Ramos and starting afresh? Or are you merely perfecting the Peter Ramos of yesteryear? What are you doing, reading, thinking? What’s new?

PR: Hard as I try to destroy Peter Ramos, the old man always returns. Last summer I was at a writers’ colony, and I promised myself I’d cut myself, and my history, entirely out of all my new poems. I had this idea that I’d only write poems about motels. It was impossible. For me, I just can’t come up with a concept before I write: for the poem to work, it must always be from the inside out, not the other way around. So if or when the new Peter Ramos shows up, I won’t know what he looks like ahead of time. I like your idea that we should just try to perfect ourselves in our art and respect our obsessions. I think Allen Ginsberg once said, “The mind is shapely,” and I always understood him to mean by this that if you pay attention to your obsessions, even if they don’t seem immediately connected, you will see a pattern, a picture. For my job—teaching American literature—I have to publish articles of literary criticism as part of my tenure requirements. My bosses appreciate my poems, but I’ve had to direct my mind almost exclusively toward criticism for the past five years. Poetry and criticism share important qualities, as you know, but for me, I have to change my mind, attitudes, schedule, and lifestyle when I switch from one to the other. I’ve written poems, but not as many as I’d been used to in the last twenty or so years. Over winter “break”—I put that in quotes, because I still have to do research, write grants, apply for conferences, write papers, reviews, etc.—I’ve had a bit of time to read books for pleasure, so I finished both books by Oscar Zeta Acosta, the famous Chicano lawyer who was part of the “Brown Power” Chicano movement in California. He shows up in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as the Samoan lawyer and cohort of the speaker. Also, I’ve been reading lots of Latin American poetry from two terrific new anthologies—The Oxford Anthology of Latin American Poetry and one containing nothing but poetry from Cuba. I’m also writing about William Carlos Williams’s connection to Latin American poetry (his translations of it) and his own bi-cultural identity. I’ve also been enjoying Joy Katz’s new shorter collection, The Garden Room. Finally, I’d like to get together a panel with you, Nate Pritts and maybe someone else to discuss the decadent second half of the twentieth century—something that covers rocket ships, TV dinners, and Sputnik-shaped chandeliers, the glorious and brave New Frontier that so quickly rusted apart and fell into oblivion.